Blogs taking over

Blogs have changed the way we communicate to people around the world. Decades ago our media was being dominated by a bunch of small media producers who would broadcast to passive audiences. Now our media such as T.V. and newspapers have to adapt to their audiences because ordinary people create media and share their creations online. We have moved from one-to-many communication to many-to-many communication because there is so much more out there to communicate with the world. Blogs are one of those ways and they are best understood in there comparisons.

In the communication world there were two shifts that boosted to make it better. The first shift was the introduction of print and the ability to mass-produce copies of work. The second shift was writing itself because writing is a technology in itself. Plato thinks that a written text is a waste because it is unresponsive. He thinks that if you write something and someone reads it and disagrees then how can that person know what the real meaning of the text is because you can’t ask the text because it won’t respond to you. Plato also doesn’t like how words can be distributed when or where the writer isn’t present. Plato thinks dialogues are better to communicate with people because it’s the best way to spread your ideas. Blogs are a combination of dialogues and dissemination because it’s a mixture of both things in which Plato describes each one.

The introduction to print was a huge invention by the Chinese and later improved by Johannes Gutenberg. Eisenstein said that print was a major influence on the Western culture developing in the fifteenth century. Eisenstein also listed six features of print that made changes in our culture and they are dissemination, standardization, reorganization, data collection, preservation, amplification and reinforcement. All these features have an affect on media because it’s used all the time in it to communicate to the world. Also with the print influencing our culture it increased literacy because it gives us greater accesses to books. Print is being dominated by mass publishing because of dissemination rather than dialogues. In the late age of print, print still holds strong as a respected medium. Many schools use print because of textbooks and other resources for the students.

Now that there is television and radio people spend half there day listening to what is going on in the world instead of reading a newspaper because people are now relying on mass media to tell them what’s happening around the world. In recent decades Internet and computers have been important to us because we can get all the information we want quick, easy, and free. All these things are killing print material and people aren’t relying on print as much anymore.

Blogs depend on hypertext, which is a form of writing, which branch or perform on request. Vannevar Bush designed the memex that proposed to have microfilm copies of books and other information built into a desk that allows the reader to make connections on two screens. With all these new technology inventions the printing culture is getting worse because it’s more expensive to set up a printing press. Now blogs are a way to communicate on the web and in a larger picture its way cheaper and can express more than a printing press can ever do.